Reissues
Adams / Cox / Fink / Fox
This album presents four noted West Coast composers—three from Southern California and one from Fairbanks, Alaska—writing haunting, generally quiet, sometimes lyric, occasionally pensive music for clarinet and bass clarinet accompanied by either string quartet or percussion and piano. All the pieces feature the playing of clarinetist/bass clarinetist Marty Walker.John Luther Adams’s Dark Wind was written for Marty Walker and this CD in 2001. Although it is a process-driven piece involving polyrh…
L'Incantesimo della Soglia
Avant-garde and experimental musics are intrinsically connected to community, collectivism, support, and collaboration. Audiences and artists, stretching to every corner of the globe, continuously rely on each other to push into ever more ambitious realms. This spirit of discourse has always been central to the multigenerational contexts of avant-garde and experimental music from Italy. For decades, neglected and over looked by their international peers, the country’s musicians and fans spoke he…
Cold Blue
Back by popular demand (and available for the first time as a CD), this essential collection of West Coast new music—an anthology known simply as Cold Blue—is a classic. Originally issued on vinyl in 1984, shortly before the demise of the old Cold Blue label, the disc quickly became the company’s most popular release. When Cold Blue was started up again in 2000, the company received numerous letters encouraging it to re-release the anthology as a CD.Although bound together by a common concern wi…
Aluminum Overcast
Chas Smith's six-movement set of variations that comprise Aluminum Overcast play with the listener’s sense of time—the perceived pace and the clock pace at which musical events take place—as they slowly progress, the spare advancing to the dense.The first five sections/variations are built from shared/recurrent phrases—melodic phrases (for bowed and struck metal), rhythmic phrases derived from geometric and Fibonacci structures, and phrases of “harmonic noise” that vary in density. The sixth mov…
Maria Falling Away
This CD brings together six of Rick Cox’s elegantly sparse, dark, sensuous, vaguely desolate soundscapes in which emotions seem to bubble just below cool surfaces (tracing a history of his work from 1990 through 2001). Most of these pieces display Cox’s subtle, idiosyncratic electric guitar playing techniques, which sometimes employ preparations placed amid the strings (similar to those utilized in prepared piano works) and the use of such objects as sponges and brushes and glass lab slides to s…
Dancing On Water
All the music on this album, with the exception of Song(s) of the Sirens, was written specifically for remarkable clarinetist/bass clarinetist Marty Walker. As Is Thought/Aurora, a casually dramatic work for bass clarinet, harp, and vibraphone, is like a miniature concerto in its structure, contrasting solo bass clarinet phrases with tutti lines.Song(s) of the Sirens, a lush work for clarinet, piano, and woman’s voice, gradually and systematically builds in texture, harmonic richness, and melodi…
I Hear It In The Rain
Five Pieces for Piano (1997), Two Preludes for Piano (1996-97), and For Celesta (1985)—the latter for an instrument that is very seldom featured in a solo setting—display Michael Jon Fink’s command of crystalline forms that are Debussyian in beauty (and occasionally in gesture) yet hold a distinctly contemporary artistic distance from their musical materials. These fragile and primarily extremely quiet pieces are performed with great aplomb by Bryan Pezzone.Living to be Hunted by the Moon (1987)…
Nikkowolverine
Nikko Wolverine (1999) is a three-movement piece scored for various bowed and struck metal instruments in non-tempered tunings. These instruments, which were designed and built by the composer, emit tones that are rich in complex harmonics and often sound more electronic than acoustic. All three movements of this work share motivic materials, but each successive movement adds more harmonic complexity and textural density to the movement that preceded it.Tons Tons Macoutes (1999) is a texturally …
Last Things
Last Things, for bass clarinet, pedal steel guitar, piano, and electronic keyboards, was written for clarinetist Marty Walker in 1987, and has been subsequently performed (as a piece for bass clarinet and tape) by Walker at concerts across the U.S. Somewhat a rhapsodic call and response between bass clarinet and pedal steel guitar, it is constructed of seven connected sections (or songs) that over the length of the piece slowly build in intensity. As the piece progresses, each section expands in…
Racional Vol 1
Exact LP repro edition. Grey-area reissue of this legendary album, with top audio quality: the seminal "Racional 1" privately released by Tim Maia on his own Seroma imprint (the name Seroma is the sum of the first syllables of Tim Maia (Sebastião Rodrigues Maia) names. SE from Sebastião, RO from Rodrigues and MA from Maia). It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Brazil’s Tim Maia. A wildly restless creative mind Tim Maia was also a huge personality. The larger than life man made a huge co…
معليش = Malesch
Their debut, pensive and relaxed. A masterpiece, originally released on Vertigo. A vinyl re-release of the debut-album by legendary krautrock avant garde band Agitation Free. "Not willing to compromise, and heavily into the avant-garde (many members studied with the influential Thomas Kessler) it took a long while until Agitation Free got an album out. By that time they had developed a cosmic styled rock with a strong ethnic element. Although in the spirit of Ash Ra Tempel and Pink Floyd, they h…
Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet
**all the five groundbreaking LPs in bundle ** here are the first ever official individual re-issues of all five of the iconic Lansdowne recording sessions by the legendary UK jazz combo, the Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet.The five albums; Shades Of Blues (1965), Dusk Fire (1966), Phase III (1968), Change Is (1969) and Live (1969), have reached almost mythical status in the collector's world. Regarded as holy grail artefacts for even the seasoned aficionado, the collective second hand market value…
Prelude To Heart Is A Lotus
2013 release. Previously unavailable, this unearthed 1968 BBC Session contains markedly different versions from Michael Garrick's 1970 classic 'Heart Is A Lotus' album. A Londoner's rain-soaked riposte to modal jazz exotica, this long lost recording is already being hailed as an essential release. Michael Garrick’s 1970 LP Heart Is A Lotus went on to become one of the most important British jazz albums of the subsequent decade. For a few years prior to the record’s release Garrick and his sextet…
Peace and Blessings
** Original 1979 vinyl edition of the album. Few copies available. Sealed copies ** A fantastic album recorded in Italy, but with all the soulful roots of Kalaparusha's earlier years with the AACM – an incredible balance of tone and timing, handled by a quartet - this obscure set features passionate blowing by Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre (heard on tenor, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet and percussion) along with the little-known Longineu Parson on trumpet, flugelhorn, flute, sopranino and record…
Four Pieces
**Original 1982 vinyl edition of the album. Few copies available** Four Pieces (recorder in November 1981) documents a long lost studio collaboration between pianist Giorgio Gaslini and Anthony Braxton. Alto and Soprano Saxophone and Piano, beautifully together in a set of free improvisations – really letting us hear the imagination that drives the duo. Two real masters of free music - the two exchanging lines that race beyond personality on an extended version of Braxton’s “Composition 191” an…
Swimming Pool Orchestra
**Original 1981 vinyl edition of the album. Few copies available** A real piece of creative madness. With "Swimming Pool Orchestra", Mario Schiano decided not only to continue with the humor of provocation (two musicians are locked in a dilapidated recording studio, where the sound engineer tries to repair the water pipes. The two try to wait, quarrel, until the studio is flooded and the record can no longer be made), but also inviting in the studio Umberto D'Ambrosio, aka Trottolino, a minstre…
Cioè...
**Original 1978 vinyl edition of the album. Few copies available** A beautiful illustration of the strength of cellist and double-bassist Paolo Damiani as a leader – that way he has of firmly directing a quartet from the place of the bass, yet always in a subtle way that never overpowers the rest of the group! The balance here is wonderful – as Strutture Di Supporto's sound drives free improvisation to great dramatic effect, and soulfully set the tune from the start – yet the lead lines are ofte…
Skies Of China
**Original 1985 vinyl edition of the album. Few copies available** What emerges from Giorgio Gaslini’s various suites is a happy explorer, recalling worldly journeys and launching musical adventures. He was the first Italian jazz musician to play in India and China and the result of each journey was an extended suite. Gaslini’s own language that emerges triumphant, a fondness for floating clusters and fractured boppish themes (his writing can hint at influences from Monk to Schoenberg, George R…
Murales - Giorgio Gaslini Quartetto Live
**Original 1976 vinyl edition of the album. Few copies available** Recorded live at Teatro Delle Arti in Roma, on January 5th, 1976, and released on his own Dischi Della Quercia (like many creative musicians in the ‘70s, Gaslini launched his own record label, both to document his own work and that of his associates) the same year, it is one of the Giorgio Gaslini's most representative works of his career in the 70's. An adventurous album, with bassist Bruno Tommaso and drummer Andrea Centazzo n…
Glass Bead Games
**180 gram LP x 2 gatefold sleeve Hi Res remastring** Fifth part of the Strata-East Dolphy Series, Glass Bead Games is arguably the crown jewel of the Strata East movement, an amorphous genre that treads an unusual path between post-bop, 70’s avant-garde and spiritual jazz, with a groove. Glass Bead Games is full of revelations at many levels. First, the decade of the 1970s did produce genuinely creative, "human" new music flowing from the jazz mainstream; second, Bill Lee was more than Spike's…